Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

Eight — "Oshkosh B'Gosh"

It was after 3:00.v.M., and even the Pentagon seemed almost still. Official Washington wouldn't start to churn for hours, not until the sun began baking the asphalt-and-concrete moat that surrounded the 34 acres taken up by the building.

James Bradley sat beyond that moat, deep within the long creamcolored corridors, still on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's E Ring behind three sets of locked doors, his suite of offices empty but for him. It was late 1970, Bradley's fourth year as the director of undersea warfare at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and it was in these early morning hours that he could dream best, immersed in the quiet of his office and in the deep oceans beyond.

He was preoccupied with notions bordering on the fantastic, plans for a new mission for Halibut, one that would shake the intelligence community even more than the photographs of the Soviet Golf submarine that had so caught the imagination of President Nixon and, unfortunately for the Navy, the CIA.

Bradley wanted to send Halibut into the heart of a Soviet-claimed sea after a quarry that was living-practically breathing-and beyond almost anything U.S. intelligence had attempted to grab before. Closing his eyes for a moment, he could almost see his target. It was a telephone cable, a bundle of wires no wider than five inches.

But what a bundle of wires. Bradley imagined the cable as it ran from the Soviet Union's missile submarine base at Petropavlovsk, under the Sea of Okhotsk, and then on to join land cables going to Pacific Fleet headquarters near Vladivostok and then to Moscow. If Halibut's camera-toting fish could find that cable, if her crew could tap it, then the United States would violate the very soul of Soviet secrecy. Here could he an open ear to the plans and frustrations of Soviet leaders, intelligence unmatched by any human spy or even the newest surveillance satellites floating high over the Kremlin.

Bradley could almost hear the words flowing through the line, technical analysis clear of propaganda, measures of the abilities and problems of Soviet submarines, information that might make them easier to trail, tactical plans for patrols that would take those submarines and their missiles near U.S. shores. If he was right, maybe the Americans could even grab the Soviets' own assessments of the test flights of ICBMs and sea-based missiles that smacked down on the Kamchatka Peninsula and in the northern Pacific. That cable might provide entry inside the minds of Soviet commanders themselves.

Of course, the Soviets would probably see Halibut's intrusion into Okhotsk as an act of piracy. If she were detected, they might try to board or destroy her, forcing an international incident that might end the delicate dance toward detente.

And there was another hitch, a big one. Bradley had no proof that this cable existed at all. Even if it did, there was no way to tell where it lay beneath the 611,000-square-mile expanse of Okhotsk. Even Bradley could see the humor in his predicament. How could he present this idea to the cadre of White House, military, intelligence, and State Department officials who were supposed to have final say over an operation as dangerous as this one? How could he say that he wanted to send Halibut out on a hunch in search of an ethereal strand?

Still, as far as Bradley was concerned, it was a pretty good hunch. After all these years of watching the Soviets, American intelligence knew that Soviet defense officials insisted on constant reports from the men in the field and that the Soviets painstakingly coded most communications sent through the air to thwart interception. If Bradley's intuition was right, Soviet admirals and generals would be far too imperious and impatient to suffer an ocean of cryptographers already overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of their work. Top Soviet officers would want, would insist upon, an immediate and simple communications method, and the only simple and secure way to talk was through a hardwired telephone system.

Any telephone line the Soviets set up between the mainland and the submarine base at Petropavlovsk would have to run beneath the Sea of Okhotsk. Petropavlovsk was, after all, a tiny, desolate port across that sea, isolated on the Kamchatka Peninsula and nearly hidden among ancient volcanoes and primeval birch forests. Okhotsk itself was almost empty, save for a few fishing trawlers and occasional submarines engaged in missile tests.

The Soviets had to consider the sea secure, given that it was nestled into the crook of Kamchatka and the east coast of the Soviet Union as neatly as the Chesapeake Bay fits into the U.S. eastern seaboard. The way in for an enemy submarine or ship was through narrow, shallow channels that sliced through the Soviet-controlled Kuril Islands. Those channels could be easily blocked in an alert.

But even if the cable was out there, where was it? Where in all those miles and miles of water lay a strand that couldn't be more than five inches wide?

Bradley cleared his mind of charts and maps, freed himself from official assessments, from the meetings, memos, and briefings that swamped the business of intelligence in Washington. He let his eyes close and his thoughts wandered to simpler journeys taken in simpler times, before the cold war, before World War II, hack to the waters of his childhood.

There he found an answer that was beguilingly simple and just strange enough to be true. It was buried in his memories of St. Louis in the 1930s when he was a boy and his mother packed him up to escape the summer's heat on riverboat rides along the Mississippi River. From the point where the Mississippi meets the Missouri River through Alton, Illinois, the boats steamed through water dyed with brown silt and banked by miles of flood plains painted with wild upward strokes of grasses until the green gave itself up abruptly to towering gray harrier bluffs. Eagles traced circles above, while sand cranes left leggy tracks along the shore. It was this scenery that captured most people riding the river-that and the riverboat orchestra and social scene on board.

But for a boy, there were other sights that marked the trip. The young Bradley had taken to passing time with the steamer captains in the pilothouse, and from there he could see a series of black-and-white signs placed discreetly along the shore. Most of the signs marked mileage and location. But there were a few, he remembered now, that declared: "Cable Crossing. Do Not Anchor." These signs were there to keep some idiot in a boat from snaring and snapping a phone or utility cable in the shallows.

Bradley's eyes snapped open as he realized that what was true of the Mississippi just might be true of Okhotsk. That's how they would find the cable, he thought. That's how they would engineer one of the most daring acts of tele-piracy of the cold war. Halibut would be led directly to her quarry by signs placed somewhere on a lonesome beach in the Soviet Union, declaring: "Watch Out! Cable Here."

This wasn't the way intelligence operations were normally crafted in Washington, but Bradley's imagination had always been vast, sometimes too vast for the rigidity that often ruled much of the military crowd. He had been dreaming about a possible cable tap almost from the moment he had gotten the job and control of Halibut. He and his staff had spent hours talking about the possibilities for Halibut and that mythical communications cable. They scanned maps and pored over charts of Soviet seas and bases, and they soon came to realize that there were three spots that held special promise, three places on the maps where Soviet naval bases were separated from Moscow by miles of water: the Baltic Sea, the Barents Sea, and the Sea of Okhotsk.

Of these, only Okhotsk was truly desolate. Covered with a layer of ice nine months of the year, the sea was as dreary and cold as Petropavlovsk, where nuclear submarines and missile arsenals were secreted among buildings that had been decaying for a century or more. Soviet naval officers made dingy homes in these cheap squares of concrete built among civil defense shelters and radar receivers.

The more Bradley thought about Okhotsk and the sub base on Kamchatka, the more he knew that Halibut was destined to go there. But throughout his first three, even four years directing her missions, there had been no safe way to allow men to leave a submarine, walk the sand 300 to 400 feet under the sea, and reach out and tap a cable. Bradley had to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision. And that had finally happened.

The same post-Thresher panic that had prompted the Navy to put money into underwater research, the same push that had given birth to a redesigned Halibut, had also paid for a program to create new ways for divers to survive in the deep. Bradley's old friend John Craven had overseen much of this work until he retired from the Navy. Under Craven's direction, the ability of divers to work in the depths had progressed at an incredible pace.

The problem had been daunting. What is life-giving air on the surface can kill divers down deep. By 300 feet down, air compresses so much that a single lungful contains about ten times the surface amounts of oxygen and nitrogen. At these concentrations, oxygen becomes poisonous and nitrogen has a druglike effect-nitrogen narcosis-that makes divers go squirrelly.

Specially trained Navy divers and scientists had been experimenting with recipes for a new underwater atmosphere that replaced much of the oxygen and all of the nitrogen with helium, which is nontoxic. On ascent, those gases could he remixed to fulfill the divers' increasing need for oxygen in shallower waters. Animal experiments had given way to human underwater habitats called SeaLabs. Placed 200 feet down off La Jolla, California, the living was dangerous and uncomfortable. At one point, the plumbing failed on one and the habitat tilted, but four divers inside survived on the new gas mixtures.

Everything was progressing well until one of the Sea Labs developed leaks in 1969. A diver was killed while trying to make repairs-not at all the kind of publicity the Navy was looking for just a year after Scorpion had been lost. The SeaLab program was unceremoniously canceled, and to outsiders, it seemed as though the Navy had abandoned the effort altogether. But development quietly continued, and Bradley and Craven prepared to put the new gas mixture and the new "saturation diving" techniques to use for divers on Halibut.

The sub was now at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard outside San Francisco being fitted with a portable version of SeaLah, a pressurized chamber to support the divers as they acclimated to the water pressures they would find if they walked the seafloor to tap the Soviet cable. But before Halibut could navigate the bottom of Okhotsk, Bradley had to win the funding and political support that the mission would require.

Bradley's office was still the clearinghouse for all submarine spy missions. He and his staff collected wish lists from top policy-makers within the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House. It was up to Bradley to come up with the operations that could fulfill those requests-the submarine trailings, the observations of missile tests, the gathering of electronic signals.[10]

After that, Bradley had to sell those missions to the fleet commanders, who still had the final word on whether any of their submarines went out and where. Bradley had already made dozens of trips to Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, and Yokosuka, 'Japan, to brief and debrief submarine captains, and he had earned their respect and trust. Besides, the daring of the cable-tap mission would make it an easy sell to these men.

Navigating through Washington required more finesse. Still, Bradley knew how to court the crowd in this town where information was currency and was jealously distributed under the amorphous guideline of "need to know." This was a place where power was measured by access, and Bradley traded access for approvals, packaging facts within a romantic haze of deep-ocean wonders. His briefings drew on the storyteller's art that he had picked up decades earlier listening to his father weave wondrous yarns of wine, women, and sea.

In fact, Bradley's idea to search for a Soviet cable was inspired almost as much by its dramatic impact as it was by its potential intelligence value. If that cable did exist, finding it and tapping it would do more to bring his office high-level exposure and funding than just about any mission he could think of. Bradley was already counting his successes in dollars and in enemies. His bounty usually came straight from the zipped pockets of other Navy departments. After he nearly decimated one project headed by a naval aviator, the man was ready to punch Bradley in the nose right there in the Pentagon. "You sonof-a-bitch," swore the burly aviator, pouncing on the captain in the corridor. Bradley didn't blame him, didn't blame him a bit. But Bradley also was unapologetic. He felt completely sincere in believing that his group was doing better work than anyone else.

As long as his program had money, Bradley had power, and more of it than any four-stripe Navy captain had a right to expect. He still reported to Rear Admiral Fritz Harlfinger, the director of Naval Intelligence, and through him to Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., who was now the chief of Naval Operations. But power or not, Bradley was still a captain in a town full of admirals, and a mere Naval Intelligence officer in a town where the top spooks reported to the president. There also were more than a few admirals who resented his refusal to take them into his confidence. One man, especially powerful within the Pentagon, insisted that he had to approve every operation before Bradley could send a spy submarine out. It was a directive Bradley found impossible to comply with. "You gave me an order that was not legal," Bradley answered when the irate admiral confronted him. Then he added, "By the way, I don't work for you."

The admiral stared Bradley down for what seemed like a long time. Finally he intoned, "All right. You can get away with this, this time. But I'll tell you one thing, Bradley. You're never going to make admiral."

"So be it," Bradley stood his ground. "So he it." Then with a soldier's flourish, he did an about-face and walked away, the drama of his departure filling him with satisfaction. There would be time enough later to realize that the admiral might just make good on his threat.

At the moment, Bradley was more concerned with his battle with the CIA over control of Halibut. The agency had already snatched command of all salvage operations surrounding the sunken Golf and was still waiting for Howard Hughes to finish building the monolithic salvage craft that would attempt to tear the entire sub from its ocean grave. Most of that was being engineered through the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, the top-secret Navy-CIA office that was still being run mainly by the CIA. Worse, the CIA seemed hell-bent on broadcasting news of all of the Navy's best submarine missions and taking credit for them.

When those missions were still entirely under Bradley's watch, fewer than a dozen top officials in Washington knew of the Soviets' lost submarine and Halibut's find. Now Bradley saw CIA officers assigned to NURO handing out clearances like candy corn on Halloween. The Velvet Fist photographs, Halibut's abilities, and even other submarine spying missions were fast becoming the main attraction in a circus where having a ticket to the show was more important than the performance, where the labels "top-secret" and "need to know" made the spectacle irresistible.

Bradley saw every briefing as a potential leak. He wanted to be the one to go to Kissinger or his top deputy, General Alexander Haig (Kissinger's chief liaison to the military), and then only when the time was right. Bradley had worked hard to earn his access to the two powerful men. The captain played on his realization that Kissinger was the ultimate bureaucratic infighter, someone who wanted to control everything about foreign policy and covert actions affecting foreign policy. Bradley knew that, more than anything else, Kissinger wanted to choose what would be presented to Nixon and wanted to make those presentations personally. As long as Bradley's missions reaped key intelligence, he knew the door would be open to Kissinger and to Haig. That had been clear the last time Bradley went to see Kissinger about Halibut's exploits.

Kissinger was half an hour late. He walked in, leaned back in a chair, put one foot on a table in front of him, and pointed the other foot at Bradley. "Veil," he began, his trademark German accent evident in every word. "You have got ten minutes. Go ahead and start."

Bradley knew better than to cower.

"Dr. Kissinger, I can't do this in ten minutes. If ten minutes is all you've got, we ought to go away and come back and do this another time. Because with ten minutes, we're just going to waste your time and mine."

"Veil, yell. You start, and I'll tell you when to stop."

More than forty-five minutes later, they were still talking. It seemed a crucial victory to Bradley.

Now, the captain knew that news of the hunt for a sunken Soviet communications cable would be just the sort of exclusive that Haig would want to bring to Kissinger, and that the national security adviser would relish bringing to Nixon. Bradley had no intention of being scooped before he was ready to present his plan, so he told only the people who absolutely had to know: the Pacific submarine fleet commander and Harlfinger.

Normally Bradley also would have marched his plan before a national oversight group known as the "40 Committee." Chaired by Kissinger, its ranks were filled with the country's highest national security officials, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the CIA. It was the committee's job to evaluate all international covert operations, everything from CIA interventions in Third World countries to eavesdropping operations aimed at the Kremlin. Other presidents had had similar oversight committees, and since the Pueblo incident, routine missions, such as the usual submarine forays into Soviet coastal waters or sorties flown by spy planes, were included in a monthly list for review. Committee members usually just provided a final glance before checking off boxes marked "approved."

But more dangerous operations-presumably any effort that carried as much risk as a plan to tap into a crucial Soviet communications line-were, in theory, subject to far more detailed hearings where the operations were supposed to pass the most basic of all tests: Are the potential payoffs worth the risk? The riskiest missions were then supposed to be presented to the president for final approval. That was the primary job of the 40 Committee: to provide a test of common sense, a dispassionate analysis of what otherwise might be a noholds-barred quest to gather intelligence. The committee was, in short, a layer of oversight designed to rise above parochial concerns, interagency rivalries, machismo, and the ever-present temptation to venture from the daring into the stupid.

But that ideal was often little more than fantasy. The committee almost never marked any mission "disapproved," and members of the intelligence agencies and the armed forces knew they could bypass the rest of the group as long as they didn't bypass Kissinger, who treated the committee as something to be utilized or ignored as he saw fit. Sometimes, after he okayed missions on his own authority, he would poll the committee by telephone, seeking back-door approvals. Sometimes he didn't even bother to do that.

The message Kissinger sent was clear: the only oversight that mattered was his. That suited Bradley and Harlfinger, who in the spring of 1971 were happy to avoid a formal committee hearing. It wasn't hard for them to imagine what such a hearing would be like.

"Where were those signs? Along the Mississippi, you say?"

"So, Captain Bradley, you say you came up with this sitting alone in your office at 3:00 A.M.?"

No, no, no. It would make so much more sense, Bradley reasoned, to try to get quiet approvals from the top and to wait to tell the full committee about the plan once he knew for sure that the cable was there, to come in saying, "Look what we've done."

Any step into Okhotsk, from the Soviets' point of view, was blatantly illegal, although the United States considered most of that sea to be open to international traffic. And a search for signs on a Soviet beach would have to take place at least partly inside the Soviets' 3-mile coastal limit, recognized internationally as sovereign territory. No one would see Halibut's jaunt inside as anything less than trespassing.

Bradley hoped Kissinger would look past that, as much as he hoped Kissinger would ignore the fact that the timing for this kind of risk was just awful. Halibut would be trespassing when Nixon was publicly painting himself as a peacemaker and statesman. The president had just gone on national television to declare that he personally had rescued flagging arms control talks in secret communications with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

All this left the captain apprehensive when he went to see Haig. With as few details as he could manage, Bradley outlined his plan to search out the cable. "If we can find it, we think we've worked out a way to tap it," he told Haig. There was also, Bradley said, a secondary mission-an underwater search for parts of a new kind of cruise missile being supplied to Soviet subs that stalked U.S. aircraft carriers.

Haig asked no questions, offered no words of caution. He didn't even bother to bring Bradley before Kissinger. Instead, he said, "Keep us informed."

Bradley realized he had just gotten all the official approval he would need. Haig would surely let Kissinger know, but the Navy's diciest plan had passed with the simplest approval process possible. Halibut was going to Okhotsk.

By the end of the summer of 1971, Halibut's refit was almost complete. In addition to the huge hump-the Bat Cave-that had inspired her conversion to a so-called special projects boat, she also sported an extra lump, a secret and crucial piece of equipment that was so ingeniously hidden atop her deck that the Navy proudly advertised its presence with no fear of a security breach.

Local newspaper headlines heralded the accomplishment of this new addition, while intoning that the Navy had relaxed its secrecy surrounding Halibut. Halibut, the papers declared, was to be the mother ship for the Navy's first post-Thresher deep-submergence rescue vehicle. In fact, the lump wasn't a DSRV at all, but a divers' decompression and lockout chamber. Welded in place, it was where they would begin breathing the mixed gases developed at SeaLab, and it was where they would get ready to go out and work underwater.

In these final weeks before Halibut was to leave, Bradley's team began making frequent anonymous visits to Mare Island. Most of the sub's officers and crew knew them only as the men from Washington. Halibut's captain, Commander John E. McNish, wasn't revealing much more.

Even in the final days before their October departure for Okhotsk, the crew still didn't know their destination. They knew only that they were leaving home for three months. That in itself was inspiration enough for the enlisted men to fill the submarine bars around San Francisco. Some of these boys were only months past their high school proms. Others were salted chiefs, veterans of smelly diesel boats or the first nuclear submarines. Together, they spent their final night onshore, in an era when being a hard-drinking, chain-smoking man of the sea was not yet an anachronism.

With their wives and girlfriends looking on, they drank themselves under the tables at Helen's. They drank until they danced buck-naked on top of the tables at the Horse and Cow. This was their favorite place, the "Whinny and Moo" to the initiated, with its darkened rooms, walls lined with photos of submarines, a Klaxon cutting through the air to announce each new round, and stolen pieces of equipment crammed onto every free surface: submarine commodes, plaques, dishes, ceremonial pennants, a torpedo casing, an anchor, enough contraband to drive naval investigators mad.

Snorkel Patty was probably there: she almost always was at these last-night events. For a decade, she had been mother, big sister, and lover to scores of submariners. She was the woman who knew what they would face on patrol without needing to be told, and she taught other young women braving the brash bar not to ask where or how or why. She was the woman who would make the men feel safe when they got home. A tender Mae West-Mary Magdalene of the submarine set.

In return, these men and boys gave her their hard-won silver dolphins, hundreds over the years. They gave her a volcano's worth of lighters decorated with their submarine insignias. And they gave her their undying adoration.

The Klaxon blew, an air-driven howl, a wolf's song mated with the bray of a sick mule. The men drank some more and hooted, then hooted louder when some innocent knob walked into the place still wearing underwear-just about everyone was checked, and anyone found wearing was unceremoniously stripped.

Inspired, the veterans dropped their pants, stood on the bar, and turned around to show off the screws tattooed in twin sets, making sterns of their rears. Legend has it that those inked propellers would ensure a safe and speedy passage. The especially brash powered their screws with a long trail of paper from the head planted in the only place possible on their naked bottoms. With the paper set afire, they raced smoky circles around the bar in what had become the ritual "Dance of the Flaming Asshole."

This was their celebration for finally getting out of the shipyard. This was a wake for their lost freedom. This was how the men of the Halibut launched one of the most critical submarine spy operations of the cold war.

The party wouldn't end until just a few hours before "Smiling Jack" McNish gave the final order to embark. Smiling Jack was the name the men had given their hulking commander, a testament to the tight grin that took the place of a growl or gritted teeth. It widened only with trouble. Few crew members remembered ever seeing the thirty-eight-year-old redheaded captain actually laugh-not now, and not on Halibut five years or so earlier when he had served as her executive officer.

That grin would be there, unchanging, through most of the month Halibut spent transiting to Okhotsk. Any other attack submarine would have made the distance in less than two weeks. But Halibut's 1950s vintage reactor could not kick up past 13 knots, and she was further slowed by the drag of the fake DSRV on her hack. Most of the trip progressed at an infuriating crawl of 10 knots as Halibut traveled a long arc, matching the curvature of the earth. Moving north to the Aleutian Islands, then down past the icy Bering Strait, past Soviet surface ships, she reached the Sea of Okhotsk.

Getting inside the sea was tense business. The crew took several hours to maneuver through a shallow channel, probably at the northernmost part of the Kuril Islands chain just below the southern tip of Kamchatka. From here, the men had a periscope view of an active volcano, but they feared sunlight more. A single glint off the periscope and any nearby submarine-hunting plane or ship would find them.

By now, they knew where they were. McNish had told them that much, and he told them the divers were going out on this mission. But he omitted any talk about Soviet cables. The commander instead declared that Halibut was there to find pieces of the new and deadly Soviet ship-to-ship missile. Only McNish, his officers, the divers, and a few men among those knighted as the "special projects team" knew what they were really up to as he ordered Halibut to move slowly up along the Soviet coastline, periscope up.

Every three hours, Halibut moved along an "S" path, or cut a figure eight, or shifted from one side or the other, or circled around. Anything to give a peek into that blind spot in her baffles, to make sure no other sub followed from behind.

The search continued for longer than a week. The men found nothing, but continued to look, to hope. Then they saw it, sitting along the beach, far up on the northernmost half of the Sea of Okhotsk: one of Bradley's signs proclaiming a warning to the careless-"Do Not Anchor. Cable Here"-or something to that effect in Russian.

At McNish's order, a fish was sent swimming out of the Bat Cave. By now, the problems with the video feed had been fixed. The pictures that came flying up into the submarine's monitors were still grainy and tinged with gray, but they were far clearer than the sonar images the men had to rely on while searching for the Golf. Now, the men staring at the monitors could even see vague shapes of Okhotsk's giant crabs, though only photographs would show the smaller fish, the clouds of luminescent plankton, the teeny jellyfish dancing diamonds as they were lit up by the mechanical fish's incandescent mechanical lights. Anything, no matter how large, that was more than a few feet from the cameras and lights was lost in the murky water-dark greenish brown from silt runoffs, it showed up dark gray on the video monitors. Only a few men were cleared to look at any of this, but the novelty wore off quickly and their shifts seemed to take forever as they stared at the screens for hours at a time.

Then the sand seemed to rise slightly, a bump on the bottom a foot or two long. The bump disappeared, then returned, a dash in the sand, followed by other dashes in the sand. At first, the men wondered whether they were imagining a broken line within the gray. But there it was again, and again, periodic gray rises and a more occasional glimpse of black. There was something there, something almost entirely buried in the sandy silt.

Halibut began to follow the line. As the video images flickered on Halibut's monitor, the fish snapped twenty-four photographs a second. Later, the fish would he hauled up and gutted, refilled, and sent out again. The film promised images much clearer than this grainy video, but the ship's photographer wouldn't be able to develop any of the rolls until later, when Halibut could move high enough to the surface to snorkel and vent the toxic darkroom fumes.

Finally, McNish gave the order, and Halibut came up in the privacy of a black night. The photographer began unraveling the rolls of film taken from the fish, working with the officer in charge of special pro] ects. In the cramped darkroom, the two men watched the images emerge. There, in the color photographs, lay the Soviet cable.

Now Halibut's crew had to find a flat strip on the sea bottom, a place to lower the two huge mushroom-shaped anchors at her bow and stern. McNish was looking for a spot well outside the 3-mile limit. There was nothing to be gained by tempting fate now. Ultimately he settled on a place in the northern part of Okhotsk, about 40 miles off the western face of Kamchatka. His men maneuvered the boat gently down to a place just above the cable. It took almost a day to move into position and anchor.

The divers had been waiting in the fake DSRV, breathing the helium and oxygen mixture for some time, and their bodies were acclimated to the increased pressure. Now they climbed into rubber wet suits that fit loosely, leaving enough room for tubes that ran down their legs, their arms, into their hands, and around their bodies. A pump in the submarine would push hot water through the tubes as soon as they left the chamber, transforming the suits into something like rubbery, wet electric blankets. The water would come through tiny holes in the tubing, seeping warmth against the chill of Okhotsk. It was November, and the water was at near-freezing temperatures.

The divers also wrapped insulation against their gas jets; there was no point in warming their bodies if they were going to breathe cold gas. Several times they checked their umbilical cords, the two-inchthick bundle of tubes and wires that provided the mixed gases for breathing, the hot-water sluices, and the links for communication, power, and lighting.

Running through the cord was one strong wire that had nothing to do with breathing, talking, or seeing. This was the emergency line, which would be used to yank them back into Halibut should something go wrong. Their only other margin for error was latched onto their belts-small bottles containing three or four minutes of emergency air, their "come-home bottles."

Finally the men were ready to crawl out the outer hatch. In the control room, McNish could see them walking what seemed a space walk. Only barely lit by their handheld lights, they cut a ghostly path through the murky water to the communications cable. Once there, they began using pneumatic airguns to blow debris and sand away from the wire. As soon as it was clear, the men started to attach the tap, a device about three feet long that held a recorder filled with big rolls of tape. Off the main box was a cylinder that contained a lithium-powered battery. A separate connector wrapped around the cable and would draw out the words and data that ran through. The tap worked through induction. There would be no cutting into the cable, no risking an electrical short from seeping seawater.

Inside the boat, men monitored the water currents, taking readings every fifteen minutes or so. Halibut swayed against her anchors, while planesmen struggled to keep her level through the hours that the divers worked to attach the recording device to the cable. After that connection was made, the spooks collected what seemed like an adequate sample of the Soviet voice and data transmissions running through the cable.

Nothing in Halibut's history suggested that this would ever be so easy. The cable had been found without a single snag in the line towing the fish. The mission had gone so smoothly that much of the crew would remain firmly convinced that their submarine had happened upon the cable by sheer accident. They had, after all, been told that the target on this trip to Okhotsk was pieces of Soviet missiles. Now, true to his word, N[cNish turned Halibut and headed for a Soviet test range.

The water there was somewhat deeper than the waters over the cable. Still, Halibut's fish quickly found a spot where the whitish-gray grains carpeting the ocean bottom became speckled with the steel gray and black of electronics and small shards of casing. Halibut had found a place where Soviet missiles went to die.

This mission also was important, for these new Soviet cruise missiles posed a terrible threat to U.S. aircraft carriers. The weapons had a new kind of infrared guidance system that the U.S. Navy had been unable to counter. Bradley had already sent three standard U.S. attack submarines to Okhotsk with orders to try to get close enough to missile tests to record the frequencies of the infrared devices as well as the frequencies of the new kind of radar altimeters that let the missiles skim close to the water surface and out of range of conventional U.S. countermeasures. The idea had been for the standard attack subs to use bulky devices attached to their periscopes to squirt bits of heat at the missiles and see what frequencies reflected hack. The task proved impossible. (At this point, the Navy was so desperate to learn whatever it could about any kind of Soviet cruise missiles that it had sent Swordfish with sonar developed for Halibut, side lit and mounted on her hull, out to scour seabeds in shallow waters. The sonar worked so well that Swordfish could skim the shallows not more than twentyfive feet off the bottom practically at flank speed.)

Only Halibut could actually send men out to retrieve anything, and now her divers were out again, this time to pick up piece after piece. The hope was to find one of the infrared devices or one of the radar altimeters. The divers stowed the pieces in a huge gondola-like basket hooked to Halibut's steel underbelly. When the gondola was filled with hundreds of missile bits, the divers climbed hack into the fake DSRV to wait out the long decompression process.

They were there much of the time it took Halibut to travel back to Mare Island. She docked about a month after she left Okhotsk.

Before the crew could disembark, tapes from the cable tap were on their way to the huge National Security Agency complex at Fort George G. Meade. That complex, located halfway between Washington and Baltimore, was where the Defense Department sent most of the electronics intelligence picked up by submarines and other spy vehicles to be decoded and analyzed. Protected by three layers of barbed wire and fences, one layer electrified, were five and a half subterranean acres of computers. These were used by some of the nation's top mathematicians and scientists to break Soviet codes. There were also thousands of Russian linguists and analysts poring over decoded communications. The massive operations building was nicknamed the "Anagram Inn," and it was behind its 70,000 square feet of permanently sealed windows that the Halibut's tapes would be played, replayed, and judged for content.

Meanwhile, the missile fragments were sent to a Department of Energy lab secreted away in the Pacific Northwest, a so-called black installation with no outward signs of the work that went on inside. There, in a large, empty room, sat the basketfuls of junked missile pieces. Bit by tiny hit, engineers sorted through the baskets, laying out pieces on a long board. They were at it for months, but finally they had a board filled, 20 feet of junk transformed into a flattened, shattered version of nearly an entire missile, a 20-foot-long jigsaw puzzle with few pieces larger than 6 inches.

Still, in all those heaps and baskets, engineers never found the infrared homing device the Navy so desperately wanted to study. (It was assumed that the devices must have shattered when the missiles careened headlong into their targets at speeds of Mach 1 or Mach 1.5.) But the radar altimeter and other crucial parts of that device were found, allowing U.S. engineers to try to build a countermeasure, one that would hopefully send the Soviet cruise missiles plunging harmlessly into the ocean.

Meanwhile, word about the cable recordings came back to Bradley from the NSA. His guess had been right. Flowing through that cable was pure military gold: conversations between the submarine base and high-level Soviet Navy officials, many of them unencrypted or coded in fairly rudimentary ways.

The find separated the cable tap from most of the communications intelligence available to the United States. The growing network of spy satellites, planes, listening stations, and subs had watched and listened as the Soviets moved troops, built bases, and sent their fleets swimming through exercises. But even the most advanced eavesdropping system, the prototype of the Rhyolite satellite launched in 1970, could not penetrate a hardwired phone line. And the few eavesdropping satellites the United States had were focused on Moscow and the Soviets' northern coast. None pointed toward the Pacific bases, the bases that were linked by the cable through Okhotsk.

To be sure, Soviet agents provided occasional insights into the Soviet psyche. But for all the drama in dead drops and late-night forays through dark Moscow streets, finding a way to consistently intercept conversations among Soviet military leaders was something that the United States had been trying to do for decades with only limited success. A set of antennas placed atop the U.S. embassy in Moscow had captured Brezhnev complaining about his health and other Politburo members talking about the traffic or their sex lives, but no Soviet leader was going to make a habit of talking about state secrets over something as vulnerable as a car phone.

Now the cable tap was providing the first inside look at the Soviet Navy's fears and frustrations, its assessments of its own successes and failures, and its intentions. And the full potential for the Okhotsk cable tap had yet to be measured. These first recordings were only samples, an ear to conversations and reports that took place over a few days on a few of the dozens of lines that ran through the cable under the sea.

Bradley saw the next step, and he saw it clearly. He wanted to tap as many of the lines as possible, and he wanted to plant a device that could record for several months or even a year, a device that would keep working in Okhotsk even when Halibut was docked at Mare Island. His staff contacted Bell Laboratories, whose engineers were familiar with commercial undersea phone cables and began designing a much larger tap pod. Just like the smaller recorder Halibut carried on her first trip, the new device worked through induction, but this tap pod was huge. Nearly 20 feet long and more than 3 feet wide, it weighed about 6 tons and utilized a form of nuclear power. It would be able to pick up electronic frequencies from dozens of lines for months at a time. Halibut could plant the tap one year, then go back and retrieve it the next.

Leaving behind proof of intrusion was risky, but Bradley's group reasoned that even if the Soviets found the tap, the United States could argue that the induction device was legal. Under U.S. law, the Constitution's prohibition against illegal search and seizure had already been ruled not to apply to currents emanating from buildings, homes, or cables.

Navy lawyers wrote up highly classified papers to that effect. These legal contortions might seem disingenuous, but they accompanied almost all covert operations. It was, after all, the United States that kept insisting that other countries operate on high moral ground and within the bounds of international law.

When the new tap was finished, it looked like a giant tube that had been squashed some from the top and welded shut at the ends. The device was crammed with miniature electronics circuits and had the capacity to record for weeks at a time.

Finally it was time for Bradley to wade through the formal approval process that he had avoided when the cable was still only a Mississippi River hunch. If Halibut was going to leave evidence of intrusion sitting in Okhotsk, the project would need more than a quiet nod from Haig and Kissinger. Despite Bradley's tensions with the CIA, it had been easy to get the agency officials he worked with to go along. They were so busy building the Gloinar Explorer they didn't mind leaving the cable tap operation to him. So Bradley presented Halibut to the 40 Committee in early 1972, while the American public was being presented with details about Nixon and Kissinger's peace initiatives with Vietnam and their historic trip to China.

Given the timing, approval for the tap mission was anything but certain. For one thing, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were at a make-or-break stage. For another, Kissinger and Zumwalt, the CNO, were engaged in an open feud. Kissinger had made a glaring mistake during arms negotiations that threatened to leave the Soviets with a dangerous lead in submarine-based ballistic missiles. In

secret talks away from his military advisers, he had agreed, offhandedly, not to ask for limits on the Soviets' massive effort to build the Deltas, a new class of submarines that would far surpass the Yankees and carry ballistic missiles with ranges of 4,000 miles. Zumwalt was furious, convinced that Kissinger and Nixon had given away the barn in their zeal to get SALT completed before the year's elections. Zumwalt, who passed off words of caution from State Department officials-calling them "bed-wetters"-was trying to force Kissinger to pay for his negotiating mistake by pressuring him to approve an even more powerful new class of U.S. missile subs: the Tridents. It was a battle he would win.[11]

Now that the CNO had thrown his considerable weight behind Halibut and her return to Okhotsk, and damn the risk, it seemed that the cable tap could easily become a pawn in the battle between the White House and the Navy. Bradley did what he could to play down the risks, making his presentation without reference to a what-ifHalibut-were-caught scenario. Beyond that, much of what he offered the 40 Committee was pure drama. The captain pulled out a map of Okhotsk. He pointed to where the signs were found on the beach and drew a path over the sea to indicate the cable. Then he boldly stated what had once been only a guess-that this was a cable that carried crucial information about the operations and development of Soviet ballistic missile submarines. His discussion of the dangers was limited to the harrowing undersea walks facing Halibut's divers.

What Bradley didn't tell the committee was just how he knew there was a cable in the first place. He left out the fact that Halibut, on Haig's nod, had already visited the wire. He only assured the committee that the Navy was certainly not going to draft the operations orders until it was convinced that it could engineer a cable tap.

By the time he was finished, Bradley had won over the room. If the arms control negotiations or political machinations gave these officials pause, they didn't show it. The cable tap mission was approved, and Halibut left for her second trip to Okhotsk on August 4, 1972. Two months after the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex, Halibut was on her way to perform the ultimate wiretapping exercise for an administration that was about to be crushed under its own tapes and covert operations.

This time McNish decided to brief his men about their true mission and the risks they would encounter. He called them into the crew's mess, one-third of the men at a time. Characteristically solemn, his grin a tight wire across his face, he stood against the bulkhead and told them where they were going, told them about the cable, told them about the tap. Then McNish told his men something else: he told them about black boxes strategically placed at how, stern, and midship. They were filled with explosives, and they were wired for self-destruct. The boxes were not carried by regular attack subs, but on Halibut every torpedoman's mate had been trained to crimp the explosive caps attached to fuses to ready the demolition boxes for detonation. Should Halibut become trapped in Okhotsk, McNish told his men, she would not be hoarded, and her crew would not he taken alive.

This briefing was, presumably, at odds with general Navy security rules. Most of the crew had no "need to know" where they were going or why. But McNish was asking his crew to go out for six months and take a risk unmatched in peacetime. Need or not, his men had a right to know.

On the way to the place her men were now calling "Oshkosh," Halibut was stranded-her clutch blew, sending the shaft to her screws spinning uncontrollably. A Halibut newcomer devised a juryrig involving a series of braces and a hydraulic jack attached to the motor. The fix held.

The men were by now affectionately referring to their usually ailing, most of the time moving, underwater nuclear-powered habitat as the "Bat Boat." The moniker stuck when somebody noticed that the huge bump created by the Bat Cave hangar made the sub look like a giant rendering of Bruce Wayne's comic-book super car.

Back in Okhotsk, Halibut found the cable easily. McNish gave the order, and the two huge anchors descended from how and stern. The divers climbed out of the DSRV lockout. In a matter of hours, spooks were listening to voices coming from the cable.

"Get in here, you have to hear this," one of the spooks called to some of the chiefs.

As he listened, one chief's eyes opened wide. He understood "nyet" Russian, but that didn't seem to matter.

"Jeeesus, this is great!" the chief said, shaking his head. "Jeeesus!" Then he began to laugh, a deep-throated, gut-shaking laugh built at once of pure bravado and the realization that they could all be caught listening to a conversation they were never meant to hear. With an adolescent conspirator's sense of occasion, the chief took off his headphones and slipped them to the next man in line.

A fortunate few were these chiefs, these men on the inside track who had the good luck to be pals with the spooks. One after another, they took their turns meeting the enemy they had tracked, pointed weapons at, harangued, and forsaken their families for. They were taking part in history. They were meeting the Soviets ear to ear, with one side deaf to the transaction.

None of this, of course, concerned the two Soviets yammering happily away on the telephone in unscrambled, uncoded Russian. They had no idea that 3,850 tons of steel and more than 120 men had conspired together to listen in to their conversation, or that soon their words would be weighted with layers of classification and given points for intelligence value in Washington.

A celebration was in order, and the divers provided one. Plucking a giant spider crab from the seafloor, they sent it into the Halibut through the DSRV lockout. One of the chiefs grabbed hold of a spindly leg, then a huge body. Someone else found a platter, a big one, the biggest one on the boat. It wasn't big enough. With legs dangling, its brownish-gray body hanging off the steel plate, the crab moved slowly as it was paraded through the engine room toward a massive pot of boiling water on its way to becoming the only casualty of the mission.

McNish kept Halibut hovering over the line for at least a week. Then Halibut made her way out of Okhotsk, leaving the tap planted and the internal recorders running. The submarine would come back to pick the recordings up in about a month. For now, the men were going to Guam. They would stay there long enough to let the tapes fill some more and long enough to patch whatever had broken on their Bat Boat.

It was a routine port stop, at least until their final night. The officers, the enlisted men, the chiefs, most everybody who was not on watch went out drinking. Then talk among the chiefs in the noncommissioned officers' club turned to the cable tap.

No one remembers who was the first to blurt out what was probably on most everyone's mind, but somebody, whether moved by fear or made courageous by beer, cracked the veneer and asked the question: Had they crossed a crucial line? This wasn't like going up against another sub or a ship and watching from afar. This was eavesdropping. What the hell were they doing crawling into the Soviet Union's backyard and tapping a military cable in peacetime? Why were they risking their lives for a mission they were all sure the United States would never acknowledge? Why were they riding a boat with a captain who had made clear that his hand was on the self-destruct button? Why were they riding a boat that could disappear without a word to their families of how or why?

Once it began, there was no stopping it. Fear, anger, concern, poured across the table. This had been building from the first moment the spooks pulled the chiefs into the radio shack and handed them the headphones. Listening to those words they didn't understand coming from a tap they weren't supposed to have planted didn't seem funny anymore. What once struck them as exciting and daring now seemed just plain illegal and dangerous.

Few of the men suffered qualms of morality or politics. As far as they were concerned, detente and diplomacy were public shows put on by both sides to hide true intentions. Still, what they were doing, the men told themselves, could be construed as an act of war. Worse, what they were doing could start the war they feared most.

For perhaps the first time since they had joined the submarine service and faced the power of the oceans and the threat of Soviet depth charges and torpedoes, some of these men were suddenly, deeply certain that what they were doing could kill them.

Then one man said it, said that they ought to tell the old man to stuff it, that they ought to tell him they didn't want to go back. Then others said the same thing in different ways.

More beers were ordered and downed. Then together, they made their way to the dock. Together, they stood in front of their submarine. Then, one by one, they climbed down the hatch, realizing that they weren't going to go tell McNish to stuff it after all. They were going to their bunks or their posts, and they were going back out to the Sea of Okhotsk.

Soon everyone was on board, except Auxiliaryman's Chief John White. He stood on the pier and announced that he was not going down the hatch. As far as he was concerned, the submarine service was a volunteer service, and he was devolunteering.

Nobody expected this. White had served more than nineteen years. He was the kind of man who always worked harder than his crew, the kind who rewarded their hard work by sending them out on the town on his tab. Maybe it was the beer talking, only White didn't seem drunk enough to throw away his career when he was only one year away from a full pension.

Still, something had made White decide to do just that, something that he refused to talk about, that day on the pier or since. In the end, he would say only that he wasn't reacting to the mission or to the selfdestruct charges on hoard; that it was all "more personal than that." Whatever his reason, Halibut pulled from port without him. White was flown back from Guam to California, where he was given an honorable discharge with a normal twenty-year pension.

For the rest of the trip, it was White the chiefs talked about. Soon they were back in the spook shack listening to the Soviets. This time they even understood a little of what they heard, as one Soviet sailor used the telephone line to practice wooing his girlfriend in English. The chiefs listened and laughed, but the joy of conspiracy had left the boat with John White.

This was to be the final leg of their trip. Their orders were to collect every last hit of information they could, then leave behind the tap to silently record the Soviets through the months that would pass before Halibut could again make the long trip back to Okhotsk. They hovered over the cable for a week, maybe more, long enough for even White's dramatic exit to become blurred into the general monotony of watch, meals, poker, sleep, watch, meals, poker, sleep. By now, the sub had been out for nearly five months, and most of the men just wanted to start their crawl home.

Then, abruptly, their routine was broken. A storm above began boiling beneath the surface. The divers were trapped outside, unable to climb back into the DSRV chamber as Halibut strained against her anchors one moment and slammed into the seafloor the next. All the men could do was try to keep a safe distance and watch.

There was no way the officers and crew manning the diving planes could keep Halibut level. The gauge measuring anchor tension moved from 10,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds to zero to 20,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds and back to zero again. An hour passed, then another. Then there was a loud crunch. Both steel anchors snapped at once, broke so easily that they could have been rubber bands.

Outside, the divers watched as Halibut began to drift upward. The men were still linked to the submarine through their air hoses. They knew that they would die if Halibut pulled them up before they could decompress. If they cut themselves loose, they would suffocate. Inside, the officer of the deck was well aware of the danger when he shouted a desperate order: "Flood it!"

He said it a second time. Valves were rolled wide open, and Halibut began to take in tons of water, filling her ballast tanks in a matter of seconds. Belly first, she crashed into the sand. The divers scrambled into the DSRV chamber.

The horrendous ride was over. But there was no guarantee the submarine would ever be able to break free of the muddy sand. Rocks scraped against and past the hull, an ongoing crunch, until the men on board were certain the barrage would wreck their boat, that they would never leave Okhotsk.

"Christ, we're here forever," one mechanic said through gritted teeth.

"Hell, we weren't supposed to be here in the first place," another man muttered.

Halibut sat, one day leading into another. The storm passed, but McNish wouldn't try to raise the boat until he had milked the cable for everything he could record. He and his crew were going to go home with their tapes full, if they went home at all. When McNish finally gave the word, one good emergency blow freed Halibut from the bottom.

She had an entirely uneventful trip across the Pacific. The response to her return, however, was anything but uneventful. Bradley got the word from the NSA almost immediately. The tap had recorded as many as twenty lines at once. The NSA had been able to separate all of them electronically. Halibut had hit the mother lode. There were conversations between Soviet field commanders covering operational tactics and plans and maintenance problems, including defects that could cause missile submarines-like the Yankees, which were now beginning to patrol in the Pacific-to make noises that might help U.S. submarines in their efforts to track the enemy. Logistical business was conducted through the line, reports that ships couldn't get under way for lack of spare parts. There was also other high-level reporting of command and control, decisions made about when and if patrols would get under way, and which submarines would be sent to lurk off of U.S. shores.

There were discussions of personnel problems, training problems, requests for more men, complaints when those men failed to arrive at Petropavlovsk. Then there were the intangibles: the dreaded political officers on Soviet submarines revealing their own private views about party leaders. The Soviet command also allowed young submariners to use the lines, patching their calls through to local stations where the men could wish Mama a happy birthday or ask their sweetheart to wait. All this put a human face on the massive enemy across the ocean.

This second effort to tap the cable confirmed one disappointment. There seemed to be little if any information about missile tests running through the line-Bradley had had great hopes that there would he information about the success of splashdowns of land- and seabased intercontinental ballistic missiles. But overall, the tap was an intelligence gold mine.

Nevertheless, there would have to be a few changes. Bell Laboratories was asked to find a way to program the next tap pod so that it could hone in on what were deemed the most crucial lines, and so the recorders could turn on and shut off to conserve tape. The idea was to program the tap for prime time, although at this stage no one at the NSA was really sure what constituted prime time, any more than they knew for certain which lines were best.

Bradley's office also had to let Rickover in on the program, at least in a limited way, despite his rancor toward the boat and her previous commander. Bradley needed Rickover's permission to make an important structural change. The captain didn't want to risk another incident like the one that had almost killed Halibut's divers. She was going to get a pair of sleighlike feet. From now on, she would not anchor over the tap site. She'd be equipped to sit on the bottom when she went hack to Okhotsk again in 1974 and 1975.

The details of Halibut's mechanics didn't interest the greater intelligence community, but the recordings did. The Navy had pulled the ultimate in one-upmanship. No human agent or standard spy boat could have collected the wealth of information that Halibut brought home.

The NSA bestowed a code name on what was now an ongoing operation: "Ivy Bells." Bradley would plan more of these missions, and other submarines would he refitted to follow Halibut's path to Okhotsk.

But Bradley would never know firsthand what his efforts had wrought. The NSA would give Naval Intelligence detailed summaries of the take, but unlike Halibut's chiefs, he would never hear a single minute of the tapes. The NSA decided that Bradley, who had imagined the cable, envisioned the signs pointing it out, and labored to get funding and clearances for the mission, hadn't earned this bit of currency. Bradley, it was deemed, simply had no need to listen, no need to know.